Colin Marshall writes about film but doubles as the host of a public radio show, triples as a blogger on culture and self-engineering, quadruples as the host of a book club podcast and quintuples as a reviewer of podcasts. He loves tea, old-school R&B and the work of Abbas Kiarostami. Email: [email protected]
Jesse Thorn is the host and producer of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America, a cultural interview program he grew from humble beginnings at KZSC, the radio station of his alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. He's also the proprietor of Maximumfun.org, which hosts such other audio ventures as Jordan, Jesse, Go!, Coyle and…
by Colin Marshall Silent Light's opening shot, a gradual four-and-a-half-minute predawn push across a bucolic field as the sun inches over the horizon, signals everything about the sensibility and aesthetic to come. It's a cautious yet intimate venture into several different levels of foreignness at once, reverently observational and hyper-aware of the wealth of detail…
by Colin Marshall Are we meant to look at Northeast High School in 1968 and marvel at the similarities to our own memories, or at the differences? Surely Frederick Wiseman's documentary, unencumbered by framing or commentary, would have looked like life when first screened. Did Wiseman himself compare the experiences of these late-60s kids in…
by Colin Marshall Quoth Abbas Kiarostami, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don't like in the movies. I think a good film…
by Colin Marshall There's this farmer. He has a nice, beautiful farm, but one year there's a big drought. So he's got no money, and the landlord says, “Look, I don't give a shit whether you got money or not money — you're going to have to pay me.” So the farmer says, “I got…
by Colin Marshall I once heard a joke astutely analogizing humanity, that most meaning-seeking of all life forms, to a race of space aliens possessed of large trunks. Presented with any given fact, the aliens respond not by asking “Yes, but what does that mean?” but “Yes, but what does that have to do with…
by Colin Marshall Where Apurba Kumar Roy goes, so goes death. As well as we know the events of the films that chronicle his life, what mid-1950s viewer could have predicted that the wide-eyed, bobble-headed tot introduced in the first would, by the third's end, have seen off nearly his every family member? Perhaps readers…
by Colin Marshall Because thousands of a certain generation's cinematic lives have been changed by this film, its territory is best approached with caution. Mine, however, happens to be among those thousands, 1998 marking as it did the opening of my prime window of cultural absporpton. Cinephilic teenagers of the 1960s had The 400 Blows,…
by Colin Marshall It's easy to see Killer of Sheep as a social tract, a cinematic essay on the boredom and hopelessness of black families in crumbling, industrial 1970s Watts — a bit too easy. Though Burnett's best-known film — and for 30 of the last 32 years, a seldom-seen one — provides a window…
by Colin Marshall It's a bit of a tic among cinephiles to label filmmakers “auteurs of x“, where x is whatever theme, mood or sensibility of which said auteur has made a habit. Ming-liang Tsai is a common target. With his spare casts of isolated characters spending so much of their time in the frame…
by Colin Marshall Though certain cultural circles customarily and wrongfully dismiss science fiction as an altogether inferior breed of narrative, the genre's bad reputation isn't wholly unearned. Just last week, I heard veteran sci-fi novelist Robert Silverberg publicly assert that, in his field, “character is necessarily subordinated to speculation”; rarely has the fatal flaw of…
by Colin Marshall Apichatpong Weerasethakul is the foremost aesthetic craftsman of his generation. (If one intends to write up the work of so bold a filmmaker, one must write boldly. If one intends to write boldly, one must open boldly. So there it is.) His work has attracted a reputation as “puzzling”, “inscrutable”, “difficult”, even…
by Colin Marshall His name is Sandor Krasna, and that's most of the information we have about him. All other qualities of Sans Soleil's verbose, peripatetic protagonist must be inferred from the wrong side of several layers of intermediation. Practically all the footage shown resides on film attributable to Krasna's camera, and practically all the…
by Colin Marshall Many reviews of Paris, Texas open by describing of the condition and provenance of Travis, its wayward middle-aged protagonist. Though this isn't a review per se, I will uphold the proud tradition nonetheless: Travis shambles into the film from a barren, near-surrealistic desert landscape, allegedly on his way back an extended impromptu…
by Colin Marshall To modern Western viewers — and even to a lot of modern Eastern viewers — the films of Yasujirō Ozu, with their rigorously mannered appearance and undeniably narrow topical range, feel neither accessible nor relevant. What a shame that is. The Ozu enthusiast’s typical response to dubious uninitiated friends is that, behind…
by Colin Marshall As an aesthetic-historical artifact, a primary source documenting the lost, oft-fetishized swinging jauntiness of early-1960s Western Europe, Cléo from 5 to 7 works. As a story that keys into the low-level dread and inklings of personal fraudulence that rise within us all from time to time — not too often, if we're…